Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible

Abstract

In Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left the theater historian Malik Gaines argues that, when set against the more famous examples of 1960s political activism, the specific performances of blackness by several key figures embodied a type of “radical ambivalence,” a politics that resisted formulation in the “illusory” terms of racial or class revolution (p. 95). In the theatrical excesses of Nina Simone's live shows, in the works of the Ghanaian playwright Efua Sutherland and the Ghanaian author and poet Ama Ata Aidoo, in the acting of Günther Kaufmann, and in the drag performances of Sylvester (stage name of Sylvester James Jr.), Gaines sees a productive complexity. When Simone bounced between renditions of folk songs, jazz standards, African work songs, and pop songs in her sets, or broke off in the middle of a tune to offer commentary, as the band played on, she evinced what Gaines calls a “quadruple consciousness,” his play on W. E. B. Du Bois's famous notion of the “double consciousness” of subordinated individuals, explored in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) (p. 21). Simone was not just a Cartesian subject marked by a sense of herself as other. She transcended that basic sense of marginalization, Gaines argues, through a process of artistic transformation. What, to some, might have seemed like curious or puzzling idiosyncrasies, were, he contends, ways she worked through the maddening persistence of an “unreconciled alienation” (p. 22). As she did so, Simone complicated any attempt to categorize her work as speaking to any one specific set of social or political issues. Similarly, the works of Sutherland and Aidoo, in their complex representations of race and national identity, pointed to the elisions and shortcomings of contemporary discussions of the “African Personality” (p. 55). And Kaufmann's performances in the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Sylvester's commanding presence in the ragtag stage productions and films of the 1970s flamboyant theatrical group the Cockettes frustrated viewers' desire to read those works through any simplified framework of race, class, or gender. In these moments, Gaines writes, “the invisible heterogeneous elements of culture, including resistant sexual, racial, and political difference, burst out of their hidden ranks and orders and into spectacular visibility” to highlight a more general “crisis of the sixties” (p. 7).